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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

When you look at the iPhone X teardown [1], you can see a number of custom Apple chips. And then you scroll down and see the Broadcom and Qualcomm chips that implement mostly the radio stack. What's to say those won't be Apple chips in the future?

[1] - https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+X+Teardown/98975#s182...

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Broadcom and Qualcomm own significant patent portfolios covering things Apple would need to produce their own chips

This is true today but doesn't have to be in the future. Technologies change. Patents expire. There will be a 6g after 5g. I'm not sure who will own the patents on it. Most likely one of those two companies for sure, but you never know. Apple could invest the R&D and come up with something much better than we have today, and we all end up with Apple radio chips in our phones instead of Qualcomm.

Qualcom and Broadcom create prototypes even before standards are finalized so it is very difficult for an outsider to get in the game.

Apple created it's own 64-bit ARM chip before the specification was ready.

Technologies change by Qualcomm inventing new ones and patenting them.

Do they have both exceptional engineers + patent lawyers? Or is their IP stack purely through acquisitions?

they definitely had exceptional engineers in the past, irvin jacob and andrew viterbi practically invented cdma while everyone else was going with tdm/fdm based systems.

people used the exact same argument when transitioning to 4G, they hoped that Qualcomm could lose the 4G battle so they could pay less qualcomm tax. what actually happened?

For those interested in the patent landscape around mobile, this blog post has a rundown of the biggest patent holders for 5G-related technologies.

The biggest ones are Qualcomm, InterDigital (a NPE), Nokia, Ericsson and Intel.

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2016/03/31/5g-mobile-networks-next...

Apple can license the patents.

But more realistically, Apple can buy Intel modems (as Intel already has a license with Qualcomm for LTE)

Does Intel have a license with Qualcomm? Why did they then go to KFTC and USTFC complaining about Qualcomm not licensing their patents to competing baseband makers?

Sounds like Apple should look at buying Qualcomm then, they could do half the deal in cash if they wanted too.

For the standards, the patents would almost assuredly fall under FRAND licensing terms (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory). Apple would still have to pay the license fees, but they already pay those.

As it stands, Apple already pays companies like Nokia and Qualcomm (until they started withholding licensing payments as part of the dispute) for use of their wireless patents. It seems that Apple making their own chips wouldn't change that situation. They license the patents now when using 3rd party chips, they'd license the patents in the future if they made their own chips.

hate to be a nitpick, but Apple doesn't have a license with Qualcomm. Instead Apple chose to outsource all their manufacturing and licensing to Foxconn whose licensing with Qualcomm predates Apple's iPhone release in 2007. In this particular case, Apple instructed its suppliers to make no further payment to Qualcomm. So I guess so long as Apple iPhone are made in China by those sourcing companies, their (indirect) licensing payment to Qualcomm won't change.

Apple could purchase both companies outright in an all cash deal and still have hundreds of billions in the bank.

Even in the US, I think _that_ would get squashed flat. Antitrust slam-dunk, no?

And most of those patents are under FRAND, hence why Qualcomm is selling itself to Broadcom now...

As I mentioned in anther post, Apple are already making their WiFi and Bluetooth Chip, W1 ( Bluetooth ) in Airpod, W2 ( 802.11n + Bluetooth 4.2 ) in Apple Watch.

So Apple has been testing a lot of things in their smaller volume products. Their next chip W3, will likely catch up to 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5.

Yes the processor that Apple makes is challenging to build but those other chips, like power management IC or audio codec aren't very challenging, relatively to the difficulty of implementing a good WIFI/LTE chip.

Patents mostly. Even if Apple made the chips themselves they would still be stuck paying royalties to Broadcom and Qualcomm.

Patents I'd expect, wireless stacks are patented to the hilt.

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